Monday, November 4, 2013

Harvest Monday, November 4th, 2013

Carrots were a big harvest this week. I picked three bunches, one of which didn't get photographed. I'm guessing the carrot harvest will be better than last year by about five pounds, but it will be eaten so fast. My daughter came home to take a year off of school and she is such a carrot lover. We have already eaten about a third of the carrots in just a month. Usually the carrots last me until late spring. But they are so good. We ate all the Mokums already and have started on the later and bigger SugarSnax. They are nice and sweet as we have had some cold weather.

Spinach has been a big hit with me and my townhouse mates. The rest of the garden doesn't really get sun from October on - I grow the vegetables and hold them in the garden until I want to eat them - but the circle garden where the spinach is planted is one partially sunny spot, so they are still growing. I pick and a week or two later the leaves are all back. I've been eating a lot of spinach and mizuna salads.

And speaking of mizuna, I eat some Asian greens every week. This week a kohlrabi was added to the mix.

And since it was predicted to be somewhere between 24F and 29F last night I picked all the beans I could find. And the figs that were ripe. It got down to 29F but still no frost. Heck 28F is usually a freeze, not just a frost. I wonder if the beans will survive this too. I don't know why the plants aren't frosting over in such cold temperatures. But it did give me an extra quarter pounds of beans to eat with a meal this week.

And I made some fig jam with the figs from last week. A very small batch as I had just half a pound. I didn't bother to can it as I just made one jar and put it in the fridge.

Beans 0.27 lbs

Carrots 2.69 lbs

Greens 3.94 lbs

Greens, Asian 1.59 lbs

Weekly Tally 8.49 lbs

Yearly Tally 491.04 lbs, $1006.42

Figs 0.42 lbs

Harvest Monday is a day to show off your harvests, how you are saving your harvest, or how you are using your harvest. If you have a harvest you want to show off, add your name and link to Mr Linky below.

Yes it is Giant Winter. I decided this year to just grow that one for over wintering as in the spring it does so well like that. Though the leaves aren't all the large right now. Bigger than normal spinach, but not the foot long giants I'll get in spring.

Considering it is now November, that is a pretty good harvest. The spinach must be very vigorous to continue producing new leaves even now. My fig tree, being only tiny, has now gone into its Winter Quarters - i.e. the garage. It will be a long time before I'm making any Fig jam!

Figs! I didn't know you could grow them in your area. Amazing harvests for early November with little sun. I've wondered about frost vs. freeze. Last year my garden was down to 26-28 degrees on about ten nights. I did cover the lettuce with sheets but all the other winter vegetables showed no damage. Any thoughts?

Figs aren't really hardy here. They die back to the ground if left unprotected over the winter. Most people that grow them, grow them in pots and bring them into their garage for the winter. I don't have a garage. So I leave them in the ground and insulate the bottom part of it so it has something to grow off of more quickly the next year.

Oh and most winter vegetables can take a good amount of frost. In a better spot (ie sunnier in winter) than my garden I've harvested Asian greens in January. I don't do that any more as it is so much work and I don't like harvesting when it is so cold out. Also the snow likes to collapse the tunnels and it is a pain to keep them up. A lot of the winter vegetables will turn sweeter as the temps drop. The sugar is their antifreeze.

I've experienced the sweeter taste of winter vegetables left in the ground when I lived in Massachusetts. Carrots and parsnips were wonderful. Sugar as antifreeze makes sense--thank you chemist! (My husband's a chemistry professor).

Your carrots and spinach look great! I'm getting neither this fall, the carrots are slow to grow and I never did get my spinach planted out. And you are getting more figs than I am! I need to give me tree another talking to...

Your harvest looks great, the spinach is really impressive. I haven't heard of winter spinach, I'll have to look it up. Between the slugs and the voles it's hard for me to grow some things. But figs can do well in the ground here, I have lost some trees and others are still going.

What is the variety of fig you're growing? I just ordered three fig trees that I'm hoping to plant this coming spring -- they're called "Chicago Hardy". We're Zone 6a here in Northwest Michigan, so I'm hoping to have luck with this variety without having to grow them in pots.

About Me

I've been gardening for almost three decades now, ever since my husband and I bought our first house. Every garden has been different. The first was small and the soil was almost pure sand. The second was larger and I had heavy clay. The third and current one which is just outside of Boston, is by far the largest even though the lot is by far the smallest. Since we bought the house new, we designed the landscaping ourselves, and the soil we added was fairly good. My challenge here is the location. We are so close to our neighbors that their houses can shade the garden.